It's Friday afternoon, and I'm still out here on Long Island, swatting mosquitoes, getting sunburned, chasing my kids and reading about murderous Mormons in John Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven." I'll be back in the city next week (when I start work again), but until then I thought I'd highlight some items that caught my eye recently, notably...
My piece for The New York Nobody Sings on King Crimson's "Thela Hun Ginjeet."
Some similarly-inclined blogging comrades of mind (blogrades?) have launched an interesting new project. Dubbed "The New York Nobody Sings," this website -- forged by EV Grieve, Hunter-Gatherer and Karate Boogaloo of Stupefaction -- is "dedicated to songs about New York. As simple as that. The only rules are that the songs must be brilliant and that the blindingly obvious numbers are excluded. The songs may be explicitly about New York or obliquely about the city in some way. There are plenty of great sites dedicated to photos and images about New York. This site is designed to be a musical accompaniment."
Sounds great, right? In any case, the gents have very kindly asked me to contribute, so look for some of my entries there soonest. In the interim, it's already well worth checking out, so get on over there. Click here to see it.
In lieu of composing anything original, here's yet another article I'm citing from somewhere else. I spotted this item on Slate today and it shook my inner dormant rock journalist to the geeky core. While I'm not exactly weeping about the demise of music mags like Vibe (where I had a laughably disastrous interview in 2007) and Blender, I can't help but fear for the more legitimate magazines I do actually read and respect; even inarguably tired ones like Rolling Stone and Spin (where I interned two decades ago). I've been saying for ages that the world doesn't really need music critics, but that doesn't mean I want to live in a world without them. From Lester Bangs to Legs McNeil, John Leland to Kris Needs, there have been legions of grizzled writers who have informed and helped shape my enthusiasm for music. I know there are scores of new, similarly-inclined scribes out there. Here's hoping they'll still be able to find the right forums/periodicals/bully-pulpits from which to spread their gospel.
Just a quick addendum to an earlier post. Turns out the alley depicted in Amos Poe's "The Foreigner" is in Noho. According to Google Maps, it's Shinebone Alley, but I always thought that was on the east side of Lafayette Street (opposite Jones Alley, and name-checked in a great Cop Shoot Cop b-side). We actually attended a birthday party for one of my daughter's little classmates in the alley in question some weeks back (see pic of Oliver in same below). If I'm not mistaken -- and this is, of course, well beyond trivial -- the alley wherein Max encounters Debbie Harry is in the portion that abuts Bond Street from the south (see way behind Oliver, on the other side of Bond).
Incidentally, I've since finished reading Rombes' book and I still can't recommend it highly enough. My copy is now distressed with dog-eared pages of entries I plan on exploring further. Go get it.
I greatly enjoyed this piece in the latest Vanity Fair detailing the contemporary travails of the culture snob (be he literary afficionado or geekish record collector) in the face of the march of technology. The bit about PiL's Metal Box rang especially true for me. Click here to read it.
I'm going away again for another few days in an attempt to syphon the last bit of vacation out of Summer `09 before I start work again the first week of August. This isn't to say that I won't be posting, but possibly not quite as much as I normally attempt to do. In the interim, here are a few items that caught my arguably-discerning eye that you, conversely, might have overlooked.
And for you fans of East Village Street art, you'll be happy to hear that not only has the fabled "Bad Pussies" mural on East 3rd Street been touched up, but there's a colorful new Tat's Crew piece up on East 2nd Street between Avenues A & B (see below):
News came down the pike earlier this week that Beastie Boy Adam Yauch (a.k.a. MCA) was recently diagnosed with cancer. From the sounds of it, it seems that Yauch is expected to make a full recovery, but my thoughts go out to him all the same. In tribute, here's a track from their last proper LP, 2004's To The Five Boroughs. While not their strongest effort, I love the NYC-centric video and the sampling of the riff from "Sonic Reducer" by the Dead Boys. Crank it up.
After slavishly pouring through Simon Reynold's "Totally Wired," I've moved onto Nicholas Rombes' "A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982." Sure, it sounds awfully stuffy and textbooky, but it's a pretty interesting read. Instead of solely targeting the by-now well-covered punk luminaries and touchstones, Rombes aims to provide some cultural context to the fabled era, i.e. what factors contributed to, collided with and/or orbited the phenomenon of punk. This involves everything from profiling the major political figures of the day through detailing key authors, critics, films, books, television shows and other cultural ephemera. I'm only about halfway through it, but so far I'm quite intrigued.
One entry that caught my interest in particular was an item about the filmmaker Amos Poe. As much of an alumnus of CBGB as Joey Ramone (although specializing in an entirely different medium of expression), Poe purportedly made stark, experimental films reminiscent of Godard and Truffaut. One such film of Poe's Rombes cites is "The Foreigner," a strange-sounding drama about a secret agent lost and wandering in the seedy streets of New York. As Rombes describes it, "the film glories in the mundane nothingness of everyday life" as the protagonist Max navigates his way around the East Village, even ending up involved in a melee in the notorious bathroom of CBGB -- with the Cramps, of all people. I was immediately curious to see it.
As it turns out, the film is indeed in print and available of DVD, but I couldn't find it in any of the likelier outlets downtown. I did, however, manage to find some clips of it on YouTube. Below is one such scene in which Max encounters a youthful Debbie Harry in an alley (oddly predating her strangely similar cameo in Glen O'Brien's "Downtown `81" by a couple of years). From the looks of it, I'm inclined to suggest that it might be Corlandt Alley between Canal & White Steets, but I might be mistaken. If anyone can accurately name the actual location, speak up. Also, who knew Debbie Harry was so multi-lingual?
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